


Amico Serenata

by midgetnazgul



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, One Shot, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-09 08:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midgetnazgul/pseuds/midgetnazgul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock copes with his new reality on the run.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amico Serenata

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: Now appropriately betaed and Britpicked! Thank you to the lovely Gunslingerannie on Tumblr! <3

                The first few weeks - perhaps even a month, he couldn’t remember – were manageable enough. Disguising his escape from London and ultimately the country required all of his attention. The pain of his injuries from the fall helped, too. Dying was the easy part – making sure he stayed that way would be magnitudes more difficult. All it would take was one glance too long at him on the street, a subway, _anywhere_ , and it would be over. Those first days and weeks were the most critical. Zipping from city to town, town to hamlet until he felt far away enough to recuperate and build himself a new, more permanent persona became a blur even to his usually eidetic memory.

                He washed up in Germany, and settled into a flat less than half the size of the common areas of 221B. However, what it lacked in space, it more than made up for in safety and defensibility. And, as a bonus, the gracious elderly woman who owned the space – and reminded him far too much of Mrs. Hudson – had an ancient violin on display in the house - her dead husband’s, apparently. She had leapt at his request to play it. In fact, she had all but thrust the worn instrument into his hands. Beaten though it was, it required only minor tuning and replacement of its bowstring. Before long, it had become his most trusted tool to aid his thinking. It kept him on-task, away from more distracting and compromising thoughts.

                Two weeks or so after moving in, a day arrived with torrential rain. Threat of flash flooding kept him locked in on an afternoon he had hoped to spend at the local library poring over topographical maps of southern Russia. It was the first day since The Fall that he had nothing left to analyse, ponder, or plan. Pounding rain on the thick glass mimicked the innumerable memories eating away at his consciousness. Everything he tried to do: read, sleep, meditate – it all brought his restless mind back to John.

                _Keep your eyes fixed on me._

                And damn the man, he had. Even at such a distance, before John had begun speaking again, Sherlock had been able to sense John’s confusion and distress. For however powerful those emotions had been before, their intensity within his friend would have only grown over the time that had passed. And what of Sherlock? He prided himself on his to-the-millisecond assessments of his own internal state, physical and mental, but creeping doubt reminded him how inaccurate and intermittent those checks had been of late. It was the closest he’d get to admitting how strenuously he’d been pushing back against the door threatening to burst open and bury him in _feelings_. For all Moriarty had been able to slither around and mock Sherlock’s attempts to pin and defeat him, _but we both know that’s not quite true_ was the one dig that now haunted him the most.

                _I had to do this, there was no other option_ became his mantra throughout the morning, but could not turn the tide already loosed. He changed tack; _I **will** return, soon enough._ Regret took a backseat to fearful doubt instead. Even _if_ he managed to explain everything to John, would he listen, much less be forgiven? He’d made it clear that he believed in Sherlock regardless of sanity and popular opinion, but would those sentiments remain now, or worse, _years_ down the road? Frustrating as it was to admit, Sherlock had no idea how long it would take to ensure everyone’s permanent safety. _John will understand, once he knows. He’s sentimental enough to appreciate what was at stake and practical enough to understand the immediacy. He and I both know he’d have done the same in my position. I’ll explain everything to him – beg him to listen, if I have to._ Doubt and regret ebbed away over the afternoon as he told himself that, over and over. By evening, however, he came to realize no other emotion arrived to take its place. No placidity through reason – _nothing at all_. At first he welcomed the sensation, but before long the emptiness ached in his chest, demanding to be filled, numbed, anything at all just so it wouldn’t continue. Long-healed specks in the crooks of his left elbow itched incessantly.

                The violin sat against the windowsill, avoiding his notice purely due to the fact he’d been avoiding looking directly at the rain pounding the glass. Once he registered its presence, he flung himself from his seat and seized it. He had barely it put to his chin before he laid the first note he could think of. It was long and baritone, conjuring images in Sherlock’s mind of the day he and John had met. Guarded, confused eyes brimming with intelligence darting up and down in hasty attempt to analyse the stranger before him just as thoroughly as he had been. John had never been able to discern much that mattered from the odd, inanimate clue, but _people_ …he was much better at reading people than he gave himself credit for. Sherlock, too, for a very long while.

                Of their own accord, his hands drew out more low notes, quiet and syncopated, thinking of John limping back and forth across London simply because Sherlock had asked him to. His rhythm gained energy and speed when the cane had been abandoned in the restaurant, working its way up to a staccato dance across the rooftops and through the side-streets of London. So it continued, all too easily, through each and every memory of their time together. Tentative, whispered high pitches hoping for mere companionship to catch and shift into true camaraderie. Frantic beats he sawed into the instrument, remembering vests of semtex and crisscrossing lines of light reflecting off chlorinated water. Jealousy and anger reflected in sharps and flats, with two different themes for each man leapfrogging over each other. Well into the night he began drawing slow, dirge-like measures punctuated with frightening screeches and pattern-less, deep growls, heedless of the hour and presence of neighbours.

                He reached his final movement in fits and starts, unable at first to completely encapsulate their final hours together even in music. Guided by the longing straining his gut, he forged a languid, tortured seesaw of melody. By dawn his fingers were bleeding on top of the strings, cuts made worse by heavy vibrato laid into the music. He finished with a feverish chromatic scale sliding down from the peaks of the violin’s range. When he pulled away from the last note his knees gave way from under him. If not for flinging the violin across the floor at the last second as he slid against the wall, he’d have ended up crushing it under him. He managed to draw his knees up to his chest and buried his face in them. The bow remained in his hand; he tapped it against the side of his head, as though to remind himself he was here and this was his reality now, no matter how temporary.

_No one could be that clever._

_You could._

                Too clever for his own damned good, given his current state of affairs.

_One last miracle, Sherlock, for me…don’t be dead._

                He’d barely heard it, being far away as he was for safety’s sake, but enough so that it tattooed itself across the walls of his mind palace, like a delinquent spraying on graffiti without regard for order or tact. With a disembodied, ephemeral hand, he scraped away at the words crowding his head. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t going to _be_ dead any time soon if he had anything to say about it, and goddamn it _John was going to know that_ , someday, even if he didn’t want to hear it. Perhaps sentimentality could be his new weapon in these strange circumstances. None of his enemies would ever expect it from him. And more than any disdain for feelings, he loved having the proverbial high ground. Decision made, he stumbled off to bed and slept a full night for the first time in weeks.

                The composition was never written down. Even if Sherlock had had access to the materials to do so, he didn’t need them. He took the old woman’s violin without permission, but in his defence, he _did_ have to leave in the middle of the night without warning. By some miracle, he managed to hold onto it despite his feverish travelling, and from Glasgow to Dubai to Saint Petersburg, he played the song whenever he could. Even when he couldn’t, when he had to stow himself away in cellars and alleys and the backs of trucks, he’d hold the violin in his hand, letting his fingers dance across the strings in phantom imitation to centre himself. On bad days, he’d add to the end; it was a little different each time, but always soft and upbeat - hopeful, even. Mycroft would be scandalised, but the thought only enhanced his singular entertainment.

                Occasionally while he played, Sherlock went over probable reactions John would have to his composition: 62% likely he’d respond with a simple smile and chuckle, 34% he’d be stunned into silence, and the last bit accounting for a spontaneous outburst of emotion (tears, thrown fists, copious amounts of swearing), depending on when Sherlock chose to play the piece, of course. Postulating the statistical likelihood of John’s emotions, however, often turned out to be delightfully misleading. It was part of what made him so interesting to Sherlock.

                And even if his jaw didn’t survive it, he looked forward to observing the final result of his hypothesis.


End file.
